The two newest planets, which still need to be reviewed by other researchers, offer the chance for follow-up study, officials said.

TESS is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered the bulk of some 3,700 exoplanets, worlds circling distant stars. TESS is expected to find more than 20,000 exoplanets during its two-year, $337 million mission.

TESS uses four special cameras and a detection method called transit photometry to look for periodic dips when a planet passes in front of its star as viewed from the satellite’s perspective.